DER SPIEGEL Challenged by Readers on Latest Hate-America Cover

SPIEGEL and Stern: Global Economic Crisis = America's Fault

SPIEGEL ONLINE's decision to launch an English site a few years back has proven a double-edged sword. It can reach a wider audience - but - when it chooses to translate its German articles accurately - it can also be challenged on its hyper-simplified reporting on the United States.

Case in point: When SPIEGEL attempted to exploit the current economic crisis with another decidedly anti-American cover and feature article with all the usual anti-American clichés designed to pander to the magazine's predominantly anti-American German readership, English-language readers spoke out. The headline quickly changed from "America's arrogance" to "Is America Arrogant?" The encouraging side of this is that SPIEGEL ONLINE's English site was willing to publish the critical responses. Perhaps this is the beginning of some real dialog - (or perhaps we are hopeless optimists). Here is a sampling:

"Dear SPIEGEL ONLINE,

I am not surprised by the America bashing in your magazine -- it is the European way. America is only good when you need us, and history has proven that you needed us very frequently. But you are dead wrong to count Americans out and to count capitalism out. Free markets and capitalism are the only road to prosperity.

I was having dinner with a friend last night and he brought his 26-year-old nephew to dinner with him. His nephew had just arrived from France to work here in the USA at a hedge fund. I asked him why come to America now with all this financial turmoil? His answer was that America still offered the best chance for prosperity. "France could never give me the financial opportunities that I can find here in America," he said.

Furthermore, if America is so down-and-out, why is an American education still the best in the world? Why is it that workers from France, Germany and Poland come here for a better future? Why don't they stay in Europe?

--Michael Faustini, New York, USA

Dear SPIEGEL ONLINE,

Rarely have I read such overwrought wishful thinking regarding the US. The US economy is challenged, yes, but I do believe the reports of our death are greatly overstated. We will continue to be the engine that drives most of the world's economy. If this is not the case, then why are world markets begging us to move quickly to fix our problem so that business as usual can continue overseas?

German bitterness over its relegation to a B-Team economy -- take a look at your tax system, loss of technology investment, perverse immigration system, etc. -- should yield the energy to improve, not point fingers. You don't like George Bush? Wait about 31 days and he'll be history. You think our system is based upon avarice and greed? Watch our Congress move against those who tried to over-leverage our markets. The bottom line is this: The current "crisis" is less a debacle than it is an opportunity to do what the US always does, namely step up and fix the problem.

-- Steve Kopper, Washington, DC"

On a final note: Let's hope whoever wins the upcoming election in the United States does not suffer from the illusion that the sort of harmful America-bashing exemplified by the cover above will go away or even significantly abate anytime soon. The price of much of the European media's arrogance towards the United States over the past decade is an audience conditioned to blame the giant world scapegoat America for virtually any and every problem.

Update (from David): In other news (Oct. 6, 2008): European shares in biggest one-day fall ever / Comment: "Fact is, European Banks are even more highly leveraged than US banks,
and many still have political appointees on their Boards (yes folks,
people more venal and incompetent than Wall Street bankers DO exist,
but in the US they generally are kept under control by being confined
to Congress. In Europe they get to play with banks and industry too).
That's why Europe is in trouble."

Update #2: Not a huge surprise, but Stern magazine also published a cover that screams: Your economic hardship is all America's fault!

"Greed and Megalomania: How the Wall Street Bosses Gambled Away Billions and led our Financial System to Ruin"

The symbolism of America as giant scapegoat is pretty obvious here. The only thing missing is a desecration of the Statue of Liberty...

Comments

Yup, same old same old. Or check this one out at Die Zeit (normally quite a serious paper): http://www.zeit.de/2008/41/USA-Krise . We're on the retreat again and having a crisis or something and the Germans are really concerned about what will become of us now that our "imperialistic moment" has passed. Hilarious.

Note from David: Pamela, the article - from 1982! - describes the studying conditions at the American University in Beirut (AUB). Fighting between different Arab factions and Israel forced the University to close. The report is somewhat biased against Israel.
The author, Karin Storch, could possibly be identical with Karin Storch, Tel Aviv correspondent of (German public tv outlet) ZDF. See http://www.pressetreff.zdf.de/viewbody.asp?bodyid=11053
She was in Beirut in 1982, according to
http://lexikon.meyers.de/wissen/Karin+Storch+(Personen)
I don't follow Karin Storch's reporting on Israel, but a superficial check of her reports at zdf.de reveals no anti-Israel bias.

We've been told many times that anti-Americanism is only a reaction to Bush's foreign policies, nothing more. My rhetorical question is then: why this outburst of anti-Americanism?

Did Bush try to invade some EU banks? I haven't read the Spiegel, but probably not.

The EU hypocrisy is again on full display. The American locusts were busy engineering the system, that is until the EU locusts showed the American locusts how the game is being played. And when the EU locusts started getting severely beaten, the crying started. "Oh, the Americans fooled us, they unloaded their junk on us, and we, brainless EU locusts had not choice but to buy".

Will the European countries *ever* face their own failures without reflexively pointing at America?

@whatdoiknow
Der Spiegel is neither representative of german media nor germany in general.
I'm following the coverage of the current financial turmoil on german tv and press. From what I watch and read, people point out that the crisis started in the US but don't blame the US for what is happening in the german financial markets right now. Surely you will find exceptions, but the the overwhelming majority of journalists/polticians/etc are not pointing at America.
So I don't see the "outburst of anti-Americanism" you mention.

“Der Spiegel is neither representative of german media nor germany in general.”

Nice try, indie80, but most of the commenters here have been around for a while. They’ve seen German anti-Americanism entirely similar to that in Spiegel documented on this site in a wide range of publications spanning the political spectrum from the “left” to the “right,” at least as those terms apply in Germany, not to mention TV. It’s quite true that German anti-Americanism is more subdued now than it was a few years ago. American racists and German bigots both have a tendency to crawl deeper into their holes when they felt the light of publicity shining on them.

Turning for a moment to the American mainstream media, they have been “vassals” and “poodles,” as Spiegel would put it, of the Obama campaign to an extent that has surprised even me. Not to be outdone, Spiegel has taken a fawning attitude towards Obama that demonstrates the truism that, to paraphrase Marx, “the leftist ‘progressives’ of the world have no country.” Even articles about “science” are no exception. The following charming “news” appeared in an article about meteorites:

“Meanwhile, astronomers have been exchanging jokes about the asteroid. It seems the object is to be given another name in addition to its previous designations of 8TA9D69 and 2008TC3. Alain Maury, one of the most well asteroid and comet experts among specialists in the field, quoted a colleague in the Minor Planet Mailing List: ‘I would name this asteroid after Alaska’s governor Sarah Palin. Why? It’s small, not very bright, and won’t leave much of a trace behind.’”

The next paragraph, added by Spiegel’s jolly author:

“One might add that presidential candidate John McCain, Palin’s running mate, can probably remember when the asteroid was formed. As a rule, such heavenly bodies originated in the early solar system, and are, therefore, four and a half billion years old.”

Droll, no? Such a light, almost Parisian touch. German humor at its best.

Helian, Mike H:
We are apparently in agreement that German humor is not one of Germany's prime exports. It does not travel very well. To me, German humor goes over like the proverbial lead balloon. The old saw about heaven being a British policeman, hell being a German policeman, might be changed to hell being a German humorist.(My mother maintained that Dutch policemen and customs officials were more German than the Germans.)

One version I heard of the joke stated that heaven is a Japanese wife and an American house. Hell is a Japanese house and an American wife. Or perhaps hell is an American house with a sub-prime mortgage.

Anyone check out the WaPo yesterday? They had an article about the "causes of the financial crisis" filling more than two entire pages, and managed to never once mention Fannie or Freddie. It was an ideological double back flip of amazing virtuosity, even for the WaPo. Maybe they'll get the Nobel Prize in Economics for it next year.

I took advantage of the low market to add another $2000 to my IRA/mutual funds. The number of shares that will buy in this market will increase my portfolio substantially when this market glitch straightens out.

You see, one of the problems of this kind of market is the psychological impact. People look at their 401k's and IRA and see that the value has dropped.

What they don't get is that they still own the same number of shares-- the value of the shares has dropped.

Therefore, it is time to buy. Your dollar will buy more now.

I also had my regular monthly contribution tripled, while I was visiting my broker.

The Education make people quite confident to find out the solution of every problem very efficiently. Now there is solution with the recession, we have to investigate it...Problem never comes without solution....Expatriate